Kace Imaging time....

I'm new to the whole Kace appliance but I have picked up the interface quickly. There is one concern though that I have. I have been told that trying to push an image to a box with about 50 Gb of data takes anywhere from 24-26 hours. What could be the bottleneck or does it just really take that long?!?!

Answer Summary: It should not take this long. An integrity check is suggested: http://www.kace.com/support/resources/kb/article/The-K2000-appliance-Integrity-Check. You should contact support.

During my testing phase, I was able to push a 17 GB image to 25 laptops in a couple hours. My post-install tasks took an hour or two more. Our total time generally fluctuates based on the number of Windows Updates since I last refreshed the image.

The two factors I noticed that significantly impact the time are network bandwidth, as pjgeutjens noted, and disk I/O. For our virtual K2K, I was able to port-team the virtual adapter and give the K2K a two gigabit connection. We used gigabit network to the clients. There is also a noticable difference between deploying to older 5400 RPM laptop drives and pushing the image to desktops. Other hardware specifications may or may not have an impact.

Running a larger number of machines at the same time may also eventually show a bottleneck at the disk I/O for the K2K itself. I don't have a reason to do more than 25 machines at once.

Of note, we also deploy via USB key, and while I did specifically pay for a higher speed USB key, we still get machines done in a few hours. My helpdesk team says doing single machines takes about 45 minutes to an hour for the initial image push and another hour or two for the post-install tasks and Windows Updates on our current 18 GB image.

First and foremost, thank everyone for your replies. I would like to also include that our network is a gigabit and the issue just seems to be for the deployment. I can create a 20Gb image and it takes maybe 30-45 minutes. The same package being sent to an identical server takes 24-26 hours to push. I have since talked to Dell and they did ask me to run the "integrity test" and log the results. My appliance is across town so I will have to go out there and obtain the results. Thanks again for the responces.

Well I went to our data center and did the integrity check. Even from the appliance in DHCP switch mode it took a hour to upload 30 Gb. However; today I went back and tried to pull the image directy from the appliance and it recovered in 15 minutes. I then tried to re-upload the image to the appliance and this time it took 17 minutes. I have our networking dept looking into it now.